DAOstack – Due Diligence Report

Summary

Pre-sale: May 1, 2018, at 4:00 a.m. GMT, with 10% bonus, but also private pre-sale with unknown bonus

Public sale: May 8, 2018, at 4:00 a.m. GMT

Whitelist: yes

Hard Cap: 30 000 000 USD

Total supply: 100 million (60 million circulating 40 million mintable in the future)

Token allocation: 40%

Token base price: 1 GEN = 1,00 USD

Accepted currency: ETH

Company information: DAOstack Limited, Gibraltar, c.n.: 116055

Underlying platform: Ethereum, ERC-20

Ticker: GEN

Pros

Use of the GEN token and accounting for plutocracy problem

Open source

Genesis DAO decentralized fund

Cons

CEO has involvement with two unsuccessful projects in the past

Private pre-sale with unknown bonus

72%

Team: 2/5

Project: 4/5

Token use case: 4/5

Token Metrics: 2/4

Roadmap: 3/3

Community and marketing: 2/3

Hype: 3/3

Description

DAOstack is an operating system for a new form of organization: the DAO – Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, a WordPress for DAOs. It’s a platform for decentralized governance that enables collectives to self-organize around shared goals or values. At the base of the DAO stack, Arc is an open, universal framework of smart contracts for decentralized governance and collective value management over the blockchain. Just as

HTTP allows the creation and interoperability of websites and web applications, DAOstack allows the creation and interoperability of web companies, collaboration apps, and DAOs.

The platform launches spring 2018 and includes a modular smart contract framework, a friendly JavaScript developer environment, and an intuitive user interface that allows anyone to create or participate in a decentralized organization without technical knowledge.

Team

Matan Field – CEO and Architect – He was a Co-founder and CEO of Backfeed – provides the protocols that make it possible for any disparate group of individuals to easily deploy decentralized applications based on spontaneous, large-scale and free collaboration. “The CEO, Matan Field, founded a project called backfeed, in 2015. Backfeed was almost the exact same project as DAOstack (only without the token), but it failed in early 2016. When asked about this, Mr. Field explained that he had taken too much on himself as at some point he was effectively the CEO, CTO, chief scientist and chief product. Besides, in his words, the project lacked focus overall. While this seems like a giant red flag, he’s right. It is a massive project to take on, and he does have a strong looking team now that he didn’t have back then.” https://hacked.com/ico-analysis-daostack/He also co-founded La’Zooz – open-source and decentralized collaborative transportation system, that uses cryptocurrency technology in order to establish, coordinate and grow its community of users, developers, and promoters alike. The app was a failure. The La-zooz website tried to do a token sale in January 2017 but the devs claimed on Twitter that their website was hijacked and no token sale was officially launched by the project founders.

Adam Levi – Co-Founder and CTO – Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) focused on Theoretical Physics about quantum effects in black-holes from Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. Studied at the same University as Matan Field. According to his Linkedin he has not yet any professional background in business development or blockchain development. But he claims to have 22 years of programming experience.

Roberto Klein – Legal & Regulatory – For 8 years he has been an Angel Investor in various companies. His first job was as Electro-Optic Engineer at RedC Optical Networks. After that, he was an Analyst/Consultant for The Dovrat Investment Group (currently Viola). For almost 3 years he was a VP for Biological Signal Processing Ltd. None of his education or past experience is focused on law or regulations.

Nathalia Scherer – Community & Biz Dev – Her background varies from Industrial and Systems Engineering, managing a technology startup, consulting for business strategy in San Francisco, to managing global communities.

Josh Zemel – Communication and Marketing – Most of his career he was involved with IMM – a full-service digital marketing agency based in Boulder, CO. We focus on building national marketing programs, where he was in various positions.

He is Co-Founder of ClientStream – a platform to enhance viral business growth that was profitable in its first year. For more than 4 years he was a Course Leader at The Integral Center – A “community-as-practice” organization exploring the frontiers of what creates stronger relationships.

From their advisors most notable are: Jordan Greenhall – Co-Founder and ex-CEO of DivX, Martin Köppelmann Co-founder and CEO of Gnosis, and Yoni Assia Founder and CEO of eToro.com.

Project

DAOstack will be not a fixed offering in decentralized governance, but rather a sandbox for ongoing experimentation, in which bits and pieces of governance infrastructure can be easily mixed and matched for each organization, like LEGO building blocks or WordPress templates.

The base layer of the stack, called Arc, consists of the bits and pieces of governance infrastructure mentioned earlier. It’s a library of smart contracts implemented on the Ethereum blockchain, each of which represents functional elements that can be mixed, matched, and even modified to create the complete governance protocol for any given DAO. Because Arc is written in Solidity code, the users most inclined to interact with the stack at this level will be programmers.

Arc.js is a JavaScript library that lets front-end developers easily build applications on top of Arc without being familiar with Solidity or the blockchain. With Arc.js, any organization or industry has the option of creating a custom interface suitable for its own use cases.

The ArcHives are a set of shared registries designed to enhance interoperability among the DAOs and Dapps utilizing Arc and Arc.js.

The first application being built on the stack is Alchemy, an intuitive user interface for budgeting and resource allocation for decentralized organizations. With Alchemy, anyone will be able to create a DAO in a few clicks, create an ERC20 crypto-token if desired, and invite others to participate in a hub of decision-making and talent-sharing. Demo presentation of MVP for Alchemy is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWm9SzYLq8A

Token use case

DAOstack’s governance templates separate token ownership and voting power into two different currencies. DAOstack generally refers to the first — the fungible, transferable token that is a form of monetary wealth — as simply token, or GEN.

The second — voting power — it refers to as reputation.

Reputation cannot be directly transferred from peer to peer, but rather is distributed by the passing of proposals, or by the adoption of protocols that result in reputation being transferred automatically. For example, there might be a protocol through which reputation is distributed for positively reviewed work. This method is used to prevent rising plutocracy in many of the blockchain projects. About this reader can read more in the blogpost of Vitalik Buterin: https://vitalik.ca/general/2018/03/28/plutocracy.html

GEN serves as the attention token within the DAOstack ecosystem. With GEN, you cannot buy voting power, nor can you vote with it, but you can place a stake for or against a proposal that influences whether or not it rises into the collective attention of the voters, the reputation-holders. If you stake for proposals that the reputation-holders then pass, you’re rewarded with more GEN. If you stake for a proposal that then fails, you lose your GEN. And vice versa if you stake against proposals.

GEN will likely have other utility on the platform too, related to The Archives, for example. Also, GEN will be the primary currency for the buildout of the DAOstack ecosystem itself, with contributors to the platform rewarded in GEN, and even investments into projects that are built on the stack tendered in GEN — according to the collective will of the Genesis DAO.

The Stack is the token that buys the collective attention of the DAOstack network, just as ETH buys the collective attention of computers on the Ethereum blockchain.

Token sale metrics

In terms of funds allocation, 33% ($10 million) will go to development, 67% goes to Genesis DAO, a decentralized fund in which anyone can create proposals, according to its governance protocol. Funds will be transferred to the Genesis DAO by the DAOstack non-profit gradually as it demonstrates stability and security. It intends to use part of its raised funds (collected via its token sale) for investments in projects that would come on top of the DAO stack (as well as in projects which will build and enhance the DAO stack), and accelerate the ecosystem, while also expecting returns on the investments.

Roadmap

The roadmap shows that the project started in January 2017. Alchemy Beta should be released on Q3 2018. On Q4 public pilot and Gnosis DAO public pilot + 5 pilots should be launched. Second Alchemy release is expected on Q1 2019 and the third one on Q3 2019. The roadmap ends for now on Q4 2019 with goals: Off-chain architecture, IPFS & Swarm integration, Delegate voting.

The disproportion of the community members on Telegram compared to other media like Medium or Reddit (where there is usually more educated discussion) shows that the project is overhyped and that many of the members of Telegram community are probably short-term speculators. But the oversubscribed Telegram could be also caused by a referral program that pays GEN.